Sailor Song: The Shanties and Ballads of the High Seas

by Gerry Smyth, Jonny Hannah (Illustrator)

Passed down in the oral tradition and sung as working songs, sea shanties tell the compelling human stories of life on the hard labor, battling the elements, pining for distant loves and far-away homes. The music's rhythms are designed to galvanize the group effort of heaving, pushing, and pulling to weigh anchor, wind rope around a capstan, or set sail.

Acclaimed shanty devotee Gerry Smyth presents the background to each shanty alongside musical notation. The lyrics are elaborated upon with explanations of terminology, context including historical facts and accounts of life at sea, and the characters, both fictional and nonfictional, that appear in the songs from the great age of sail to the last days of square-rig.

Genres: Nonfiction, Music

160 pages, Hardcover

Published June 30, 2020

Reviews

[Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most gorgeous and detailed collections of sea shanties I've ever seen. The book begins with a brief history of shanty traditions and a synopsis of some of the various types of shanties that exist, as well as which activities they supported on vessels (heaving, hauling, raising the anchor, etc).

Forty shanties are featured, each accompanied by musical notation, lyrics, and a short history of each piece. The melodies are notated as simply as possible (without compromising the lilts and unique character of each piece) so even those with only basic music-reading skills can follow along.

The overall art and design of the book is stunning. Various historic images are featured throughout the book, supported by beautiful, modern illustrations by Jonny Hanmah.

[Jenny · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have no idea what rabbit trail of library searching led me to this book or why I put it on hold. It was clearly an impulse not borne of my actual reading habits. But it showed up and I gave it a shot. It's a pretty book, full of the music, lyrics, and backstories to a bunch of different sea shanties. (Which, in fairness, could be really interesting if you're in the right mood.) I might offer it to my girls to see if they want to learn to play any of the shanties before I return it to the library.

[Meg]

Gorgeous art. The text is a mix of academese and general interest history and a curated shanty collection. (No Wellerman, sorry, but yes Blow the Man Down and Drunken Sailor)

*edited to add* I was hoping for more crudeness, the author kept talking about how unprintable some verses and versions were and now I gotta hunt down the dirt myself???

#bookclub4m